The Troubled Man
by Henning Mankell
(Harvill Secker, R215)
Swedish small-town police investigator Kurt Wallander is a troubled man. He is becoming acutely aware of his failing health and memory, feels lonelier by the day and gets involved with one of the most difficult and politically charged cases of his career.
Wallander has, over the years, become a cult figure in this genre.
Films have been made of nine of the previous books by Mankell featuring the notorious investi-gator (this is the 11th), as well as a three-part BBC series featuring Kenneth Branagh as the likeable rogue.
Guided tours are offered in his hometown Ystad, south-west of Malmö in the province of Skåne to illustrate his following (he even visited South Africa). But, sadly, even Wallander ages and the author has announced that this is his last appearance.
Håkan van Enke, retired high ranking naval officer, disappears during his daily walk in a forest near Stockholm.
It has nothing to do with Wallander when something happens in the capital, but Wallander’s daughter Linda (who is now also in the police force) is going to be married to Hans van Enke and he and the senior Van Enke are therefore co-grandfathers of the young couple’s daughter, Klara.
What’s more, just before his disappearance, Van Enke, on his 75th birthday, apparently also a troubled man, cornered Wallander in what seemed a confiding mood.
Van Enke’s bitterness about a professional setback takes the reader back to the troubled times with the neighbouring Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War in the 1980s when foreign submarines had a way of showing up in Swedish waters.
The author sheds light on this issue – and the subsequent unsolved assassination of then-prime minister Olof Palme – in the prologue to The Troubled Man.
Mankell, a supporter of Palme and neutrality back then, is known to use his writing as a platform for his political views.
This isn’t a police case for Wallander. Finding it irresistible, he is soon investigating the secretive life of Klara’s other grandfather. Håkan’s friends, colleagues and wife, Louise, all seem mystified why he would vanish.
Wallander, booked off after forgetting his service pistol on a restaurant table, uses his sick leave to get up to his old sleuthing tricks as the plot thickens.
He discovers a previously unknown, seriously disabled sibling and when Van Enke’s wife, Louise, is found dead, poisoned with a substance from a defunct East German laboratory, he gets his nose well into it. Triggered by the series of jolts, our troubled man slips into his usual phleg-matic mode to get to the core of the case.
These complicated jolts in his family (especially insinuations that his kind, smiling mother was a spy for Russia) make the young Hans van Enke a troubled man as well – all this on top of financial problems as a manager of a hedge fund.
More should not be given away about the plot.
But one can mention that the international political goings-on of the 1980s add to fascinating reading woven into this not-so-ordinary whodunit: the fear of the USSR, the activities of the CIA all over (here in South Africa as well) and the secrecy blanketing it all, until disillusionment made all wonder… why?
Mankell writes of Wallander’s fear of deterioration and helplessness “as if he were turning into an hourglass with the sand silently running out”, to emphasise that the sleuth has turned 60 (the author himself is 62). This deterioration is a theme running beside the plot.
Wallander fears developing dementia as his father did (his father painted the same landscape 7 000 times) and that he will not have enough time to enjoy Klara.
“Kurt Wallander is lying in his bed, thinking of death,” he says to himself one night.
The reappearance of people from Wallander’s past, like his alcoholic former wife and terminally ill lover Baiba from Riga, seem to make the sand run through the hourglass even faster.
But, and a big but, Kurt Wallander is still a fierce and astute master at solving a mystery and Mankell uses this last appearance to keep the Swedish in the top ranks of sleuths.
Henning Mankell spends six months of the year in Mozambique where he and his wife, Eva (daughter of film director Ingmar Bergman), head the Teatro Avenida in Maputo.
He was recently quoted as saying: “One of the things life has taught me is that one mustn’t let one’s creativity lapse. Perhaps it’s just fear of an empty space opening up in existence. When I cease to be creative, I’ll die.”